It's okay not to be coping in the midst of a global crisis. Most of us aren't.
Last week, in the middle of the night, I woke up crying. It wasn't wholly atypical, a nocturnal sob is firmly in my repertoire of signs-Alex-might-not-be-doing-so-well, but it still struck me as unexpected. As I shuffled into a seated position, blinking into the darkness around me, I pondered what possibly could have tipped me over the edge. Had my weekend been stressful? Well, no — unremarkably sedentary. Work? Being at home was odd, but I was doing okay. Personal life? Nope. Flummoxed, I shrugged back into my duvet and reached over to my phone, poking warily around in the dark, already wincing at the promise of light. But in my temporary blindness, my hand snagged something else. Untangling the elastic of the face mask from my finger, I stared at it dumbly. Ah, but of course, the pandemic. I'd momentarily forgotten about the pandemic.
In the last week or so, the world has begun to unravel. Coronavirus, or COVID-19, has eerily begun to take over every aspect of our lives — an invisible, deadly spectre rampaging through the otherwise well rehearsed orchestra of society. It's bullied its way into the centre of our collective consciousness, to the point where all roads lead to the virus, even those we'd typically rely on for distraction or diversion. The previously uncomplicated act of going outside requires a thorough assessment of risks. Supermarket shelves stand us up belligerently. Friends and strangers process their confusion, their boredom, their anger out loud, our social media feeds now a torrent of lonely, contact-starved human beings externalising their fears in the wake of a wholly unexpected trauma.
Basically, coronavirus has fucked everything up.
And yet, life keeps happening around us. Those of us still with our jobs, work. Those without put contingency plans in motion. We attempt to keep ourselves informed on the newest advice from our respective governments, sometimes overwhelming ourselves in the process. We despair as we hear about the plight of our fellow human beings who by mere coincidence or poor luck are treading a more gruelling path than ours— healthcare workers, the self-employed, retirees, the critically ill. It's a lot to process.
And as we process, most of us are quietly acknowledging that our mental health is probably suffering. Unexpectedly stuck indoors, we've little to do but contemplate the suite of new problems now competing for our brain-time. How will I pay rent? How will I feed myself? What's going to happen to my loved ones? What's happening to society? Will the world ever recover? Problems that might've once come pre-packaged with shake-n-bake solutions are now the object of our intense mental and existential scrutiny. And understandably, for almost all of us, this is translating into anxiety, anguish, and unforeseen, acute stress. In short, we're all going through it. Badly.
And so what are we doing? We're trying to make it better, of course. Humans are unmatched in their problem-solving prowess, especially when it comes to emotions or feelings we consider undesirable. Faced with an all-consuming sadness? There's an app for that. Or a pill. This resourcefulness, this ability to call upon the external world to develop solutions for our internal problems is profoundly important. Effective troubleshooting has played a large part in our success as a species, and very often these practical solutions to our emotional woes have enormous merit.
But sometimes we reach for the practical, and in doing so, betray the emotional. We convince ourselves that negative emotions are dangerous obstacles to be overcome and so begin to busy ourselves overcoming them, without even taking in the shape or size of the obstacle itself. We begin to solve before we've even really understood or fully acknowledged the problem. And when faced with a looming existential threat, never before encountered by our generation, our instinct to obsessively fix is no match for the enormity of what we see before us.
And yet, we’re still trying. I’ve seen this trope played over and over this week, with most coronavirus mental health-related coverage echoing the same sentiment — fix, fix, fix. I’ve read a version of the same listicle countless times, boldly named something like "10 Top Tips for Managing Your Mental Health during Self-Isolation". Routines are key, I read for the fifth time this week. Drink plenty of water! Human contact is essential! Ever tried yoga in your bedroom?
But what these articles, the bastards of our love affair with practicality and productivity, fail to include is any meaningful acknowledgement that in the face of an unprecedented global crisis, yes, it is normal to feel overwhelmed. What we need, much more than a checklist of various ways to get better, is reassurance, recognition that things are really bad right now, and a reminder that to experience emotional anguish in the face of such massive adversity is perfectly and utterly human.
So I'm going to give it to you here instead.
What we are experiencing, individually and as a species is terrifying. It’s an uncomfortable sentiment to express, but it’s important to acknowledge. There is no 'right' way for your brain to react to what is happening and there is no magical solution to resolve the bevy of negative emotions you are undoubtably grappling with. Of course there are practical measures you can take to control your external environment in the wake of such a cataclysmic shift in routine, and eventually, when you feel up to it, you should try to put some of those measures into place. But many, many of us aren’t able do that right now, and you need to know that if you find yourself in that camp, this doesn’t mean you’re dealing with this any worse than anyone else. What we are experiencing, collectively, is a form of grief — we are losing the things in our life which customarily give as a reassuring sense of normalcy. And grief affects people differently. It doesn’t have a rubric and it doesn’t follow any discernible pattern — we can try to control it but we will come up short every time.
What we can control is how generous we are to ourselves when we are experiencing it. We can approach our grief with curiosity, and if we dare, compassion. We can forgive ourselves when we feel like we're not coping, when we become consumed in our own distress. We can abstain from beating ourselves up when we fall into less than ideal patterns of behaviour to get us through the day. We can be gentle with ourselves when we decide we're going to move past it, and inevitably can't. We can choose to share our grief with those around us who themselves will almost certainly also be suffering, and in doing so support them to feel less alone. We can cry. We can laugh at the absurdity of it all. We can stay in bed all day, eat terrible food, stare out the window, get overly consumed in our phone, our social media, whatever we choose to distract ourselves. You are allowed to process this at your pace, in your way. And you are entitled to all of your feelings.
The next few weeks and months are going to test all of us. And like any test, we aren’t going to get everything right. But if there is one thing I can urge you to do — please, I beg you, just be kind to yourself. So little is within our control at the moment. We can’t go out, we can’t see our loved ones, we can’t live our lives in the way we’d normally want. But if we give ourselves permission to be kind to ourselves, unfailingly, while we stumble through this, then I truly believe we can come out the other end relatively unscathed.
And right now, that hope is getting me through.
